Aug 24, 2011

The progressive concealment of the body that goes along with
civilization keeps sexual curiosity awake. This curiosity seeks to
complete the sexual object by revealing its hidden parts. It can however
be diverted [“sublimated”] in the direction of art, if its interest can
be shifted away from the genitals on to the shape of the body as a
whole. ~ Freud

In the scopic field everything is articulated between two terms that act
in an antinomic way – on the side of things, there is the gaze, that is
to say, things look at me, and yet I see them. ~ Lacan

Francisco Goya - La Maja Desnuda - circa 1797–1800

Representing pubic hair on women was taboo for centuries in
Western art. While a number of paintings did reveal a bit of bush,
Goya's painting (above) is considered one of the first depictions of
pubic hair because he scandalously painted an actual woman rather than
one cloaked by the subject of mythology. As a result, Goya was summoned
to the Spanish Inquisition to expose his model and patron for the
painting. One may wonder what all the fuss was about in our current porn-on-demand culture, but clearly hair below the belt was not appropriate for representation.

Lucas Cranach the Elder - Venus and Cupid - 1508

Titian - Venus of Urbino - 1538

In Art/porn: a history of seeing and touching, Kelly Dennis
points out that "the male "pubes" referred to the adolescent growth of
pubic hair that traditionally signaled the coming of age of the public
male: historically, the moment that initiates participation in
citizenship, property ownership, and the legal control of women. By
contrast, the female "pudendum" named that of which "one aught to be
ashamed" and thus that which must be hidden and kept private."

Jean-Leon Gerome - Phryne Before the Areopagus - 1861

Édouard Manet - Olympia - 1863

Similar to Goya's painting, Manet's Olympia
depicts a real woman who exposes herself without modesty and fixes her
gaze onto the viewer. Despite her hand covering her beaver, Olympia was condemned as ‘immoral’ and ‘vulgar’ by its contemporaries. Baudelaire wrote to Manet regarding Olympia, stating "you are only the first in the decrepitude of your art."

But Goya and Manet were still painting within a tradition of idealized nudes and odalisques.
It would be Corbet who opened the door to the graphic representation
and revelation of pubic hair and its power to shock with L’Origine du monde,
1866. The painting had been commissioned by a Turkish diplomat, Khalil
Bey, for his own private viewing who, understanding the power of the
image, hung the painting behind a green veil. When the diplomat went
bankrupt, the painting was sold and went missing for a time. It was
later discovered hanging in the country home of Jacques Lacan, also veiled, although this time by a sliding wooden panel constructed and decorated by the artist André Masson. However such covering, with its implicit revealing, is itself an erotic device.

Why
does a man paint a fragment of a woman’s body? Why the vagina? Why does
he repress her name? It is not easy to represent in painting a loved
object; it produces anxiety. It seems likely that Courbet split her
body, cropped it in order to represent her. Removing her name seals the
objectification. Here is a psychotic moment. On the one hand there is
beauty in the rendering of the flesh. On the other hand emotional
intimacy is denied by the erasures. ~ Juan Davila - Courbet’s “The Origin of the World Renamed”

Gustave Courbet - L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) - 1866

While
the Japanese woodblock prints imported to the West after the opening of
Japan to trade in 1854 did not directly influence Courbet, it is known
that Hokusai's work in particular was available and relevant to many of Courbet's contemporaries
(James Tissot, Camile Pissaro, Monet, and Manet). Baudelaire wrote in a
letter in 1861: "Quite a while ago I received a packet of japonneries.
I've split them up among my friends.." The visible pubic hair in Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (along with the advent of photography) cannot be ignored as influencing a shift away from the hairless snatch.